Your SaaS bill is a tax on not knowing this exists.
At some point you signed up for Slack because the team needed to talk. Then Notion because you needed a wiki. Then Asana because someone complained projects were falling through the cracks. Then a file sharing tool, a password manager, a calendar app that "integrates" with the others.
If you're running an e-commerce operation, the stack keeps growing: something for your product catalogue, another tool for coordinating with suppliers across time zones, something else for shipping documentation across multiple markets. Every new country, every new supplier category, another app.
Each one made sense at the time. Together, they cost you $400 a month, require onboarding every new hire, and none of them talk to each other properly. And every year, at least one of them raises prices or gets acquired.
We ran a trading company this way for years, paying the bill and the attention tax both. Then we stopped, and rebuilt the whole thing on tools that were old when we were kids.
La Nao is ours. We do about $7.5M a year and ship 250,000 to 300,000 parcels into more than ten countries, buying from manufacturers in seven. The team is six people across three time zones. We replaced every SaaS subscription with open protocols: no Slack, no Notion, no Asana, no per-user anything. The whole stack costs about $52 a month and has run for years without us having to think about it. The money was never the real win. Getting our team's attention back from five apps engineered to keep it, that was the win. The full case study →
This site makes the argument. We also wrote down the whole thing, step by step: the exact tools, the exact settings, and the real working files behind them.
The complete build manual. Free to read.
Eleven chapters covering every tool in the stack, written by the people who run it. Read the whole thing in your browser, buy the toolkit of working files if you decide to build it, or have us set it up for you.
What this actually costs you
Here is what a typical 10–20 person operation pays, conservatively, for software that does what email, spreadsheets, and a file server already do:
| Tool | What for | Monthly (10 users) |
|---|---|---|
| Slack | Team chat | $87 |
| Notion | Docs + wiki | $100 |
| Asana or Monday | Project tracking | $130 |
| Dropbox or Google Drive | File storage | $60 |
| 1Password | Passwords | $40 |
| Total | ~$417/month | |
| Our stack, all of the above | ~$52/month | |
That is $5,000 a year. For tools that mostly duplicate functionality that the internet has handled natively since the 1990s.
Money is not the biggest cost. Your team's attention is the biggest cost. What happens to your team's attention when their work lives inside five different SaaS apps which are all trying to maximise engagement and use?
What we use instead
Every problem those tools solve has a standard protocol equivalent: older, more reliable, costs almost nothing, and will still be working in 20 years regardless of who gets acquired or pivots to enterprise.
Team communication and decisions that don't disappear
Quick questions and urgent matters
Shared files your whole team can access
Tracking projects and tasks
Company passwords and shared credentials
Internal documentation and SOPs
Calendars, scheduling, reminders
The whole setup, with the Situation Room template and the AI scripts, is in the playbook. Free to read, in full, no email required.
See the playbook →This is not for every company
Setting this up is a few focused days. Not weeks, and not a specialist, but it is real work: someone willing to sit through tutorials and debug. You also have to teach your team, which means trusting them to learn tools that were not built to be "intuitive."
The companies that do well with this stack share one trait. They stopped assuming their people need software to do their thinking for them. Email etiquette, folder structure, wiki formatting: these are learnable skills, and most people master them in a week.
If your edge is staying lean and protecting your margins, this stack will serve you for years. If you need enterprise SSO, compliance automation, or a tool that impresses an investor in a diligence call, this is probably not your moment. We would rather tell you that now than take your money and have you find out later.
Open standards and AI are a natural match
Every AI tool on the market right now is trying to "integrate" with your SaaS stack. That means APIs, paid tiers, and your data travelling through their servers.
When your company runs on open standards (plain text emails, flat files, a wiki stored as text on disk), AI works directly on your data, locally, without a middleman. You can give a model access to your entire email history, your project spreadsheets, your wiki, and get answers in seconds. No integration. No subscription. And as models get better at holding context, this advantage compounds.
Read the playbook
Every tool in the stack, the exact settings, and the working files. Free to read. Buy the toolkit for $249 if you decide to build it, or have us do it for you.
See the playbook →Join the list
A small group of operators running lean on open protocols. Lighter tips and real discussion. No platform. No algorithm. Just email.
Join the list →